In mid-March Chris took five of his most trusted musician friends into a studio for eleven hours to record. They came out with over an hour of music which will serve as the core of the soundtrack. Chris, being the thoughtful fellow he is, even brought along a little crew to film it. They did a pretty rad job:

Here's a snippet of an unmastered mix over one of the ambient soundscapes I've made for the game. This is for the Beach area:

After adding a few minor finishing touches, he'll be sending the soundtrack out for final mastering. In late May, I'll be taking his stems and final masters and twisting them into a trippy aural odyssey for the Dreamworld. Look out for another featurette on that process in early June.

Dialogue System

With the core animation work done (well, Dropsy's anyway), I've recently started focusing on arranging NPC dialogue. While Dropsy isn't supposed to understand everything spoken to him, I think it's important to give him as much of an advantage as possible. After a bit of experimentation, I've decided to add color coding to certain word types, as shown here:

Obvious advantages aside, this system also allows us to reuse icons in different contexts. Here are a few examples of 'dialogue' I've written for an NPC who is freaked out by vampires:

I've sent a few strings of icons around to people for testing, and they were generally well understood without any environmental context. I'm also really enjoying the amount of imaginative interpretation the system allows. The less detailed an icon is, the more imagination is required. There are a few characters whose icons will be 'accented' to accommodate for their tone or dialect. For example, an insane characters' icons may appear as broken, discolored, or disfigured in some way.

For fun, go ahead and try to interpret those three lines. They're a bit on the easy side, but let's see what you guys think.

The red verb in the second line looks like someone playing an electronic organ to me. Do I need more practice (at recognition, not playing instruments)? I didn't realise I was going to be taking the Rorschach test when playing the game. (Not complaining, just an observation.)